Washington — A federal judge on Thursday temporarily blocked the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing systems at the Social Security Administration containing the sensitive information of millions of Americans, delivering another setback to President Trump’s efforts to overhaul the federal government.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Hollander wrote in a 137-page decision that a group of unions challenging DOGE’s access to systems of records at the Social Security Administration was likely to succeed on its claims that the efforts violated the Privacy Act and a federal law that governs the federal rulemaking process.
She granted a request for a temporary restraining order that was sought by the labor unions, which filed a lawsuit in February that challenged the legality of the Social Security Administration’s decision to allow DOGE to get its hands on sensitive, personal and confidential information pertaining to millions of Americans.
“The defense does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose SSA records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent, and which contain sensitive, confidential, and personally identifiable information,” wrote Hollander, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
